48 comments:

I'll buy that it's not a political statement, but I won't buy that it wasn't someone being funny.

Had to use the heads they had? If I bought that, I'd probably have responded to all the UK lotteries I've won or helped out that poor widow from the Congo get her dea husband's money out of the country.

Agree: Re: George RR Martin’s politics. He’s pretty much a lefty and given the political bent of most of HBO’s programming, I doubt that they “had” to do it (like there wouldn’t be plenty of prosthetic heads from “True Blood” that they could have used). That being said, the Starks are pretty much the de facto “good guys” in AGOT/ASOIAF and likening Bush 43 to the leader of pretty much the only decent faction in the series may not have sent the message that the creators had hoped. ;)

i read somewhere that the heads really are expensive. George Martin (the author of the books) wanted the producers to put a copy of his head on a spike but it was too expensive so they couldn't do it. It does make me laugh, though, that OF COURSE there just happens coincidentally to be a George Bush decapitated head lying around Hollywood. View it as a compliment because fuck 'em if they can't take a joke, right?

Loved the Game of Thrones books and I've been watching the show on DVD. It's really good. George Martin is a big ole librul, how predictable, but bleesedly doesn't seem to feel much of a need to comment on real world politics.

Wow, any number of fans would have LOVED to have mock-ups of their heads on the spikes! In the last book in the series published, Dance with Dragons, one character gets ripped apart by a giant. The character in question was named for a fan that won a contest, and was dressed in the colors of the hated Dallas Cowboys. (Martin is a huge fan of the New York Football Giants and Jets, and thus hates the Cowboys. Of course, all right thinking people hate the Cowboys.) It was considered quite the honor by the fan in question and the fanboys and -girls generally.

I don't doubt that this instance was intentional, but such things sometimes just happen. In Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part III, Richard Duke of York is tortured on stage, decapitated, and his head later displayed on a pike. When the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton did the play a year and a half ago, the bloody plastic head naturally looked a lot like the actor, a bald bearded Englishman named Jeremy West. Here is a still from the scene where the live duke is being physically and verbally tortured by Queen Margaret.

To get to my point, I wish I had a picture of the bloody plastic head, because it looked exactly like Andrew Sullivan, whom the apolitical actor had never heard of (I asked him). Not that I wish such a fate on AS, but the resemblance was amazing, and hilarious.

The first chapter was good, the first two books bearable, it was sharply downhill after that.

I could never figure out how the economy worked anyway. Few roads, no manufacture, little agriculture, Talk about fantasy.

Most fantasy novels based on medieval themes like Game of Thrones don't deal with the constructs of what makes those societies tick. Rather the writer concentrates more on the intrigue that drives the story rather than the structure of how that fantasy world exists. Which is really to bad. Because there could be great literary content if Martin dug deeper into how his world ticked rather than popping up antagonists everywhere.

Methadras - the ordinary TV viewer would be turned off by real political content and I don't mean "The West Wing" crap. Fact is things didn't really move that fast back around 1450 or so, the pace of change was pretty glacial and doesn't fit the network TV format. Thus the need to gloss over all that and focus on battles and intrigue.

Most fantasy novels based on medieval themes like Game of Thrones don't deal with the constructs of what makes those societies tick. Rather the writer concentrates more on the intrigue that drives the story rather than the structure of how that fantasy world exists. Which is really to bad. Because there could be great literary content if Martin dug deeper into how his world ticked rather than popping up antagonists everywhere.

Before you go down that road, please keep in mind what George Lucas did in the prequels with the trade federation. There's a reason they don't dwell on such boring subjects.

The amount of waste in Hollywood is so minimal that therefore to not believe this no-other-faces-in-the-crowd-save-George-Walker-Bush-The-Fourty-Third-President-Of-The-United-States-Of-America narrative belies racism, and more, on your part, hater.

It's like folks thinking NBC editors can edit a sound or video clip to their desire, which they can.

So shut up.

Editors don't edit.

Hollywood is broke and therefore the art suffers, mightily: George Bush abounds.

There's no real political bias that I can see. The politics revolve around how the marginal--midgets, children, bastards, prostitutes, the handicapped--all plot to stay in the game and, sometimes, even win. I enjoy the show, and if it's true that its creator is a committed liberal, I enjoy it even more for keeping any analogy to current politics so circumspect.....I lost interest in Battlestar Gallatica because it kept hammering lberal talking points. I don't watch sci fi for the poli sci.

I don't watch because I read all the way through Dances with Dragons and realized that Martin is yanking my chain and either has no place to go with the story or is deliberately trying to see how much he can antagonize his readers and still sell books.

I haven't been this unhappy with a series since Phillip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, nor with an author since Samuel R. Delaney's Dhalgren.

My feeling is "screw with the readers, lose my patronage" and that's what Martin has done.

Come on, we can fight back better than just whining. If GWB was beheaded by Geoffrey then GWB must be one of the good guys. And that also makes Geoffrey then more analagous to our own narcissistic boy king. Photoshoppers, get to work!

W looks good in the shaggy mane. I don't know anything about the book or the series, but just on principle I'm with Amartel, Icepick, The Drill Sgt, and Kevin. One of W's most sterling qualities was his forbearance. Another was his sense of humor. I bet he gets a kick out of this.